Fear, Force, and Leather - The Texas Prison System's First Hundred Years, 1848-1948
The Lease Era 1871-1883
The Cunningham & Ellis Era
To avoid the earlier problems, the state mandated Cunningham & Ellis to maintain the prison in good repair and provided guidelines for feeding, clothing, and punishing the prisoners. The 1879 legislature authorized the governor to appoint a revamped three-man board of directors and a supervisor who would directly manage the guards, enforce discipline and ensure humane treatment of the prisoners, maintain the books and accounts, and write monthly reports. An assistant supervisor would do the same for the outside work camps. The state implemented good conduct rules by which a prisoner could earn time off his sentence.
Cunningham & Ellis made improvements to the food and the hospital at Huntsville and undertook repairs and new construction, including a brick wall that completely enclosed the prison. Most of the prisoners were put to work on sugar or cotton plantations, with a handful working on railroad construction, the building of Rusk prison, wood-chopping, or in prison shops. For the first time, the prison became profitable.
A prisoner named Frank Furlow was punished in the stocks, a device in which the prisoner was forced to stand with his arms lashed to a pole. The punishment could be fatal if the prisoner was hung too high and was unable to support his own torso.
An investigation into conditions at a Wood County camp revealed that 18 men had died due to harsh treatment and filthy conditions.
However, continued reports of brutality made a mockery of the system in the eyes of the public. In 1882, the Legislature revoked Cunningham & Ellis’s lease and awarded contracts to several different companies.
The leasing system collapsed in 1883 when the newspaper Texas Siftings exposed the “kegs of beer, demijohns of whiskey, and black cigars” that had been used to bribe legislators to award the new contracts and turn a blind eye to escapes and inhumane treatment. Some legislators had been invited to poker games and then were allowed to win large sums of money. In the aftermath of the scandal, all of the leases were terminated.
Learn More About Thomas J. Goree
Learn more about Thomas J. Goree, the prison superintendent who insisted that Texas adopt new ideas from the emerging fields of penology and criminology.